In the early 19th century, division and violence rose rapidly as the nation faced an impending conflict over slavery. At the time, the eventual triumph over slavery was anything but certain. This ideological battle called for exceptional leadership willing and able to advance the position that enslaved people had long held—that of slavery’s morally corrosive nature. One rural minister out of Ripley, Ohio, the Reverend John Rankin, offered precisely this kind of leadership, leading many of his peers to refer to him as the “father of abolitionism.” His life is a sterling example of how one person's resistance can help spark a whole movement.
Few today would include Rankin in a list of notable abolitionists. Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison are renowned, and rightly so. But in important ways, Rankin’s work provided a foundation for these titans to build even more support for abolition.
The first few decades of the 19th century saw a steady rise in anti-slavery thought and activity. In this period, Rankin worked closely with Charles Osborn in east Tennessee following the formation of the Tennessee Manumissions Society in 1815. In other parts of the country, Black leaders like James Forten in Philadelphia opposed colonization efforts and worked to advance the equal standing of Black people in the United States. Abolitionist publications, like Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation, were also beginning to sprout.
Rankin gained broader attention through a series of Letters on American Slavery which he addressed to his brother Thomas in 1824 and 1825, following his discovery that Thomas had purchased enslaved people. Rather than writing directly and privately to his brother, however, Rankin published his letters through a new local paper in Ripley at the time—The Castigator.
While this was not an expressly abolitionist paper, the editor, David Ammen, was a friend and neighbor who shared many of Rankin’s anti-slavery views and who was eager to share Rankin’s arguments with his readers. This was the first time Ammen had engaged his paper in the debate over slavery in this fashion.
The influence of slavery in the United States was on the rise as Rankin’s letters circulated throughout the Ohio River Valley. The Missouri Compromise, passed in 1820, ensured that slavery would expand west of the Mississippi. Even in the north, pro-slavery sympathizers scoffed at the idea of limiting the institution any further. Rankin believed that without a widespread moral awakening, the prospect was slim that slavery could be abolished.
His intention wasn’t to publicly shame his brother, but to confront a culture of slavery that was gaining ground even among his own kin. Rankin was deeply disturbed by his brother’s actions. Both were raised in a deeply abolitionist household in the wilderness of eastern Tennessee at the dawn of the 19th century. If his own flesh and blood could abandon their family’s convictions, he wondered, what hope was there to defeat slavery?